Book Image

Troubleshooting Citrix XenApp®

Book Image

Troubleshooting Citrix XenApp®

Overview of this book

Citrix XenApp® is an application virtualization product from Citrix. It allows users to connect to their corporate applications from various computer systems and even mobile devices. XenApp® has grown into a complex software with ever-expanding infrastructures in place. Together with tight integrations with other systems such as Terminal Services, Active Directory, and other third-party authentication services, troubleshooting XenApp® has become more complicated. This book teaches you how to approach troubleshooting complex issues with XenApp® deployments and understand the problem, find a fix or workaround, determine the root cause, and apply corrective steps wherever applicable. The book progresses to give you an idea about the many supportive components that play an important role in XenApp’s application delivery model and should be considered while troubleshooting XenApp® issues. It also shows you standard troubleshooting processes so that you can resolve complex XenApp® issues in a mission critical environment. By the end of this book, you will see how and where to use supportive components that help minimize XenApp® issues. Also, we’ll explain various tools that can be useful when monitoring and optimizing entire application and desktop delivery model.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Component interaction


To understand how the different XenApp/XenDesktop components interact, it is important to first understand the XenDesktop FlexCast Management Architecture (FMA) and the easiest way to do this is to highlight the main steps taken when starting a published application or desktop.

The following steps assume XenDesktop 7.5/7.6 is used together with Citrix StoreFront and/or NetScaler Gateway. The scenario where web interface is used instead of StoreFront is not taken into account:

  1. The user initiates the connection using Citrix Receiver or a browser; ports 80 or 443 are used for the communication. The connection is made to the StoreFront or to the NetScaler Gateway if the user is external.

    If the user is authenticating against a NetScaler Gateway (an external user), then the NetScaler validates the user against Active Directory using port 389 and forwards the validated user credentials to the Citrix StoreFront on port 443.

  2. StoreFront will authenticate the user by connecting...